Lily Allen needs to Smile

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I'm probably right: Lily Allen is one of the most mindlessly mean celebrities of all time. This was first brought to my attention a few years ago when she wrote a song that namechecked Cheryl Cole (then Tweedy) and called it Cheryl Tweedy. Cheryl innocently took it as a compliment, an assumption which Allen took as completely preposterous, causing her to insult Cole further by saying that it was all written in the spirit of sarcasm. Cheryl responded by saying that Lily looked like a 'chick with a dick' - perhaps not totally fairly (alright, I'm only saying that because on a couple of [badly lit] occasions I've been told by the odd crackhead that I look exactly like her), and Lily, always one to hide behind her keyboard, issued a statement on her Myspace page (paha) that said, 'Cheryl if you're reading this, I may not be as pretty as you but at least I write and SING my own songs without the aid of Autotune. I must say taking your clothes off, doing sexy dancing and marrying a rich footballer must be very gratifying for you, your mother must be so proud, stupid bitch.'

Whoah there. That's going a bit far, isn't it? Saying you sing, I mean. Because I was more under the impression that you sort of talked in a really tuneless way. Not to mention the fact that you actually just called someone a stupid bitch. Most people I know haven't used those two words together since hitting puberty. Why do I get the impression that for Lily, they're cemented together and always on the tip of her tongue?

Anyway, all this was brushed under the carpet years ago. Allen, er, 'retracted' her statement after Cole explained that she'd already 'bitten her tongue' over Lily calling her bandmates Nicola Roberts and Sarah Harding ugly and vile respectively. A few years, and several more celebrity feuds later (she even tried to start something up with Madonna, branding her 'mental') and Lily, clearly bored at home with her baby, has decided, in light of recent news about Sarah Harding, to kickstart 2012 by reopening a closed case: namely Lily Allen vs Girls Aloud.

Lily, there are five of them. If we put you in the ring, I think we know who'd lose. Sorry, did I say lose? I meant die. But it's fine; we're not putting you in the ring. You choose to do all your fighting from the comfort of your sofa, Macbook on lap. You're not even very good at it. Tweeting something like 'wow 40% of Girls Aloud will have been charged with assault' just seems to be in very bad taste once you hear that Harding was 'dragged around the floor by her hair' by her ex boyfriend on the night in question. Imagine that; being violently abused by someone who is supposed to care about you, having to involve the police, and on top of all the other press attention, having a woman who is more famous for her Twitter feed than her career, and who has no real grounding for an informed opinion on you, writing venomous 140 character 'observations' about you on the Internet.

If the above doesn't completely cement your opinion of Lily as quite mean and an occasional idiot, take this in. You may need to sit down, because it's my turn to be venomous, and for good reason. Lily Allen, who constantly slags off other people in grammatically sub-standard tweets, just named her first kid Ethel.

Yeah. I thought you might need a minute or two.

Back to the matter at hand. Alright, it might be too late to change your daughter's name, Lily, but you can quite easily change your attitude. You're a mother now, and if you want to be a good one, you need to teach your child to be polite and kind to other people by example. If you're bored at home breastfeeding, you don't have to start a Twitter war with a woman who has just been assaulted by her boyfriend - it has been scientifically proven, for example, that Australian TV shows such as Home and Away and Neighbours have miraculously combative powers in the case of new-mum boredom. I suggest you sit back with the remote, enjoy your baby, and for once, take your own, one hit wonder-y advice - Smile.